Bit Trip

Released a year ago, the Bit Trip series has been taking up a fair amount of my time as I try to slowly hone my controller tilting skills to near rhythmic perfection. Gaijin games is also developing a fourth addition, called Runner, which I will no doubt log many hours on.

Details..... Three games, released for WiiWare between April and May in 2009, called Bit Trip Beat, Bit Trip Core and Bit Trip Void. Each has a wonderful 8 bit aesthetic that harkens back to my early days of gaming on the carpet. And like the games of old, each has a very simple core gameplay element that is explored in wave after wave of increasing difficult obstacles and timing.

I won't go into too much detail about each one, but I'll try to explain at least Bit Trip Beat. It's like pong, only one sided. Instead of a single square pixel to bounce off your paddle you have to deal with returning thousands of pixels, each one part of a sequence that contributes to the music. Quickly the game gets into very difficult situations as your trying to smoothly move down a slope of 12 beats and then snap back to to the top of the screen to hit that one that was speeding in. All this has to be done while tilting the wiimote like some kind of twisty remote thingy. Words have failed me, let me try again.

Controlling beat requires you to hold the wiimote like a ear of corn, and you must rotate this wiimote the same way you would nom on some delicious corn on the cob. Fun? Yes. Different? Most definitely. Problem? Potentially. Now maybe I'm just getting old, but holding on to this controller like that and trying to preform precise movement on the beat left me very tense. It was a good kind of tense, the kind that you don't notice because it's so much fun, but I noticed it later.

So Beat is basically a fun rhythm game that is even more fun for 2 players. At 3 players your paddles get significantly smaller to compensate for more players, which makes it much harder. I've only been able to complete 2 of the 4 levels, and I can only proceed this far with a single friend of mine who developed his skills in tandem with mine. This is great, because it's something that we can both come back to when he visits and try and push further.

Void and Core have their own neat game play features. In Void you have to balance growing huge, purging extra mass and avoiding white dots, while in Core it's rythem based pixel zapping but much, much more difficult than either Void or Beat.

Gaijin is next releasing Runner later this year, which looks like a side scrolling running game with similar aesthetic to the previous three. It looks okay, but without playing it who can really say?

Anyway, the current Bit Trip Trio are awesome wiiware titles. For $20 you can nab all three and Void and Beat are multiplayer. Each one is a deep exploration into their related way to play the game and you get some neat bit trip music to do it to. While no stories are really being told and you're not going to be blown away by the millions of polygons, you're still going to have a fun and consuming time learning the rhythm and feeling satisfied when you can nail tat 354+ beat streak (my personal best).